Hairy heads on the railroad

No. 2. Taxidermist's Department of the Kansas Pacific Railway. Buffalo, originally uploaded by SMU Central University Libraries.

It is amazing what you can find accidentally on the internet. This photo is from the archives at a university and shows the taxidermy department at Kansas Pacific Railway. The stuffed buffalo heads where apparently used for advertising. Times were different back then. I wonder if this was the only railroad that had a taxidermy department. (I better ask PP and BV, they know everything important about railroads, or they can find out if they don't know.)

Stamp of the Day: Rural, historical landscape in America

This IS historical America. Prairie transformed into endless wheat fields, a railroad with a steam train (what kind, PP?), and telegraph poles. Today, we still have the wheat, but no trains and the telegraph poles, rotten at the bottom, are falling down with their green glass insulators. Many prairie flower species only survive along old railroads, road sides, or in unkept grave yards; places that have become refugia from mass market agriculture.